A microfluidics platform for combinatorial drug screening on cancer biopsies

Federica Eduati, Ramesh Utharala, Dharanija Madhavan, Ulf Peter Neumann, Thomas Longerich, Thorsten Cramer, Julio Saez-Rodriguez () and Christoph A. Merten ()
Additional contact information
Federica Eduati: European Bioinformatics Institute (EMBL-EBI)
Ramesh Utharala: Genome Biology Unit
Dharanija Madhavan: Genome Biology Unit
Ulf Peter Neumann: RWTH University Hospital
Thomas Longerich: RWTH University Hospital
Thorsten Cramer: ESCAM – European Surgery Center Aachen Maastricht, Aachen
Julio Saez-Rodriguez: European Bioinformatics Institute (EMBL-EBI)
Christoph A. Merten: Genome Biology Unit

Nature Communications, 2018, vol. 9, issue 1, 1-13

Abstract: Abstract Screening drugs on patient biopsies from solid tumours has immense potential, but is challenging due to the small amount of available material. To address this, we present here a plug-based microfluidics platform for functional screening of drug combinations. Integrated Braille valves allow changing the plug composition on demand and enable collecting >1200 data points (56 different conditions with at least 20 replicates each) per biopsy. After deriving and validating efficient and specific drug combinations for two genetically different pancreatic cancer cell lines and xenograft mouse models, we additionally screen live cells from human solid tumours with no need for ex vivo culturing steps, and obtain highly specific sensitivity profiles. The entire workflow can be completed within 48 h at assay costs of less than US$ 150 per patient. We believe this can pave the way for rapid determination of optimal personalized cancer therapies.

Date: 2018
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-018-04919-w Abstract (text/html)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:nat:natcom:v:9:y:2018:i:1:d:10.1038_s41467-018-04919-w

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
https://www.nature.com/ncomms/

DOI: 10.1038/s41467-018-04919-w

Access Statistics for this article

Nature Communications is currently edited by Nathalie Le Bot, Enda Bergin and Fiona Gillespie

More articles in Nature Communications from Nature
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().